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Looking up at the neon sign outside Top Pot Doughnuts here in Seattle. Another overcast day that screamed out for black and white photography.
Yes, I am the weirdo who would take black and white pictures of colorful neon signs.
Back in Summer 2007, Heather Champ started the Lucky Film project... out of the goodness of her heart, she gave away 100 rolls of expired Lucky Super 100 film to a fortunate few film fanatics. All the happy recipients had to do was shoot their film, and share the results.
Sadly, I missed out on her generosity.
Until November 2007, that is, when she released a final 50 rolls into the wild, one of which came winging its way to my door. Where, unfortunately, it languished, waiting for a suitably momentous opportunity to shoot it.
Now, I've long been astounded by the feats of colour that can be achieved by 'redscaling' print (or slide) film - basically by turning it back-to-front, resulting in a wild red-yellow cast to all the photographs. It was on the wonderfully talented .danimal's stream that I first saw the idea, and lately Trapac has been doing wonderful things with it too. It struck me as a fab way to use the Lucky film; the unpredictability of the process seemed in keeping with the project as a whole.
Sadly, the results that came back from the photo lab were less than inspiring. Bitterly disappointing might be closer to the mark. Rather than the vivid colours I was expecting, what came back was a more, well, sort of vomity beige. Having looked at the negs, I was convinced that the lab had accidentally colour-corrected the scans, I took it back for them to rescan... and got something that still seemed vomity, though marginally less beige.
Having looked around on flickr a bit and found a few people who'd redscaled Lucky film, and got substantially better results than me, I'm unsure whether it's the fact the film was expired that made my ones appear so insipid, or whether it's really an artefact of the scanning.
In the meantime, Heather announced that she was preparing a Blurb book, to contain some of the results of the project, and that everyone participating could submit up to three shots. Of course, I very much want to be a part of that - so I've chosen the three compositions I like best, and adjusted the levels in photoshop to the best approximation of how I believe redscale Lucky film should appear. I still feel more than slightly fraudulent doing that - even though Heather has made it clear that any postprocessing goes - but at least I'm being open about what I've done.
This is one of the three levels-adjusted images.
So, do I feel lucky? Hmmm...
I was in the mood to experiment today so I took the fisheye lens for my 35mm Canon and held it up to the end of my Sony Cybershot. Not sure they turned out the best...but it was fun!
Bang Saen, Thailand. 2005.
This is my long suffering spouse. Today I'm grateful that he didn't tell me to take my camera and ..... Actually, he is a pretty cooperative model, and puts up with my experiments. This was an attempt to "shoot from the hip". I was surprised at how effective it was. [gratitude 39a/365]
© 2009 Sarah Brooks. All Rights Reserved.
Another shot of boys taken from the ground up. Remember Nick? Yeah... I guess I just like taking pictures from this angle.
Random Fact: Charlie was about to pretend to stomp my camera. He wouldn't dare.
For the Utata project Iron Photographer 78, with the following required elements:
1 - a chair
2 - an umbrella
3 - polaroid-esque
The polaroid-effect comes from a small program called Poladroid.
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A shameless cat portrait with the chair and umbrella playing very soft in the background.